Are we British turning French, shrugging our shoulders at political sex scandals? Or did Major and Prescott finally made the idea of the pants-down MP seem so grotesquely mundane that we have had no option but to laugh and concentrate on their second homes instead? Either way, for a good old-fashioned sex scandal these days you need to travel to America, where politicians still espouse (a word, ironically, from the same Latin root as “spouse”) family values to fundamentalist voters.
The cleverly scripted and thoroughly entertaining new US drama series The Good Wife could have been inspired by any number of recent affairs - from Bill Clinton’s interns to Mark Sanford, the married Republican governor of South Carolina, and his Argentinian lover, by way of John Edwards, who only last week finally admitted that he fathered a child out of wedlock during his 2008 bid for the White House. In fact the series was ripped from the headlines about Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York who was caught in a hotel room with a prostitute.
Alicia Florrick (ER’s Julianna Margulies), the heroine of The Good Wife, was once, like Spitzer’s humiliated wife, Silda, a high-flying lawyer. When Alicia’s husband, Peter (Sex and the City’s Chris Noth), an Illinois state attorney, is jailed for sexual and financial wrongdoing, she has to go back to work at the same law firm she left eight years previously in order to support her husband’s political ambitions. She has legal fees to pay, and two children (Grace and Zach) to raise.
Peter still thinks that they can return to how things were, but as Alicia hisses at him during a prison visit, when he glibly attempts to assure her that he can overturn his dismissal from office. “They are playing a tape in Grace’s (school) computer lab of you sucking the toes of a hooker. You think I care about the small print of your employment contract?
Julianna Margulies recently won a Golden Globe for this performance, and whether British viewers think it is any more deserved than, say, fellow nominee January Jones’s wronged wife in Mad Men, only time will tell. She is good, though - a tight ball of repressed rage, who, after the inevitable stand-by-your-man press conference, gives Peter a hefty slap.
The series itself is partly a standard-issue legal drama, as Alicia strives to prove herself more capable than the firm’s young hotshots and fight off the ill will of her husband’s numerous enemies, and partly a portrait of a woman coming to terms with a very public betrayal and the need to take the lead role in her life once again.
In one scene towards the beginning, Alicia is welcomed back (sort of) to the law firm by the only female partner. “Not only are you coming back to the workplace fairly late but you have some very prominent baggage,” she tells Alicia, before pointing to a framed photograph of herself with Hillary Clinton. “But, hey, if she can do it, so can you.”
